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Event Detail

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?

In this Seminar, Dr. Vijayendra Rao discusses the World Bank Policy
Research Report, “Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?”
a subject of intense debate and advocacy, and billions of dollars
in development aid. Dr. Rao will briefly review the history of
participatory development and argue that its two modalities,
community-based development and local decentralization, should be
treated under the broader unifying umbrella of local development.
He will compare organic participation (endogenous efforts by civic
activists to bring about change) and induced participation
(large-scale efforts to engineer participation at the local level
via projects) and focus on the challenges of inducing
participation. Dr. Rao will discuss “civil society failure” and
explain its interaction with government and market failures. He
argues that participatory development, which is often viewed as a
mechanism for bypassing market and government failures by
'harnessing' civic capacity, ought to be seen instead as a
mechanism that, if done right, could help to repair important civil
society failures. His review of the evidence looks at a variety of
issues: the impact of participatory projects on inclusion, civic
capacity, and social cohesion; on key development outcomes, such as
income, poverty, and inequality; on public service delivery; and on
the quality of local public goods. He draws on the evidence to
suggest several recommendations for policy, emphasizing the key
role of learning-by-doing and in creating effective monitoring and
evaluation systems that allow for learning. About Vijayendra Rao
Vijayendra Rao is a lead economist in the Development Research
Group of the World Bank. He integrates his training in economics
with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology, and
political science to study the social, cultural, and political
context of extreme poverty in developing countries. Dr. Rao
haspublished in leading journals in economics and development
studies on subjects that include the rise in dowries in India, the
social and economic context of domestic violence, village
democracy, and how to integrate economic and social theory to
develop more effective public policy. He has co-edited Culture and
Public Action; History, Historians and Development Policy; and
co-authored the 2006 World Development Report on equity and
development. Most recently, with Ghazala Mansuri, he co-authored
the World Bank's Policy Research Report Localizing Development:
Does Participation Work?